In recent years, Ethernet® supports high-speed data communication of 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps. Thus, network devices using Ethernet tend to consume a larger amount of power. In particular, power saving in the embedded devices is requested.
Power is saved depending on an active or inactive link state between a conventional Ethernet network device and an external network device.
Such a conventional technique is known, for example, the technique disclosed in PTL 1.